Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

“Less Of The Heroine Than The Woman”: Parsing Gender In The British Novel, Susan Carlile

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay offers two methods that will help students resist the temptation to judge eighteenth-century novels by twenty-first-century standards. These methods prompt students to parse the question of whether female protagonists in novels—in this case, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), and Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia (1762)—are portrayed as perfect models or as complex humans. The first method asks them to engage with definitions of the term “heroine,” and the second method uses word clouds to extend their thinking about the complexity of embodying a mid-eighteenth-century female identity.

“Not As She Is” But As She Is Expected To Be: Representations, Limitations, And Implications Of The “Woman” And Womanhood In Selected Victorian Literature And Contemporary Chick Lit., Amanda Ellen Bridgers

MA in English Theses

In this thesis, I address the influences of the Separate Spheres ideology on representations of women in both Victorian women’s literature and modern Chick Lit. I analyze three primary images of women – the Angel of the House, the Governess, and the New Woman, the relationships between these images and the Spheres ideology, and how modern images have been influenced by the social impacts of the gendered expectations within the ideology. Within each investigation, I include a discussion on works of literature including Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain, Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes, Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola …

"Good To Think With": Women And Exempla In Four Medieval And Renaissance English Texts, Jennifer Fish Pastoor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines four English texts—Beowulf; Ancrene Wisse; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ Man of Law’s Tale and Second Nun’s Tale; and Richard Hyrde’s English translation, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, of Juan Luis Vives’ De Institutione Feminae Christianae—in terms of their use of exempla related to women. These texts all find women good “to think with,” to use, from The Body and Society, Peter Brown’s appropriation of Levi-Strauss’s famous wordplay. The ways in which these Old English, Middle English, and modern English texts portray women’s lives and bodies as a gateway into thought about the Christian life are also …

Bad Girls In Corsets: Women And The Transgressive Body In The Nineteenth Century, Colleen Warwick Green

Open Access Dissertations

Women, and their bodies, posed an increasing anxiety for Victorian society. Culturally and outwardly, the Victorian era strove to maintain a level of decorum that, increasingly, the nineteenth-century woman were, rebelling against. The urge for women to break through social barriers and constraints binding them to the century created a divergence in thought from the traditional mores of the past, in turn affecting the ways in which womens’ bodies were portrayed, displayed and manipulated by the authors and artists of the century.

As women entered actively entered into spaces once closed to them, they furthered the rift of uncertainty and …

Plays And Punks; Or, Aphra Behn And The Restoration Woman, Amanda J. Thompson

Theses & Honors Papers

In many ways, the Restoration Period in England (1660-1700) is defined by its interest in sexuality. Following the Interregnum (1649-1660), sexuality became a mechanism to distinguish royalists from the “puritanical followers” of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), particularly through the emergence of the libertine (Novak 56). Libertinism “made the senses a primary source of knowledge,” which challenged “conventional morality” through ritualistic fornication, drunkenness, and adultery (Staves 20). Men, like John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) wrote bawdy poetry celebrating their sexual conquests. Libertines were also regularly featured in Restoration drama, with playwrights like William Wycherley (1640-1716) and George Etherege (1636-1692) …

Review Of Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, And Friendship In Early Modern Britain, Angela Rehbein

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Review of Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014. xi, 256 pages: illustrations; 24 cm. ISBN 978-0-300-17740-4.

Recalling Anna, Reclaiming Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Approach To Jean Rhys's "Voyage In The Dark", Emily Duffy

English and Creative Writing Independent Study Projects

A psychoanalytic reading of Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark, which compares the experiences, dreams and memories of the character Anna with that of Freud's protagonist, Dora, in his Portrait of Dora.

Protofeminist Women In Bronte’S Jane Eyre And Braddon’S Lady Audley’S Secret, Allison Wong

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Extremes Of Gender And Power: Sycorax’S Absence In Shakespeare’S The Tempest, Brittney Blystone

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

Review Of Stephen Bending, Green Retreats: Women, Gardens And Eighteenth-Century Culture, Nicolle Jordan

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Review of Stephen Bending. Green Retreats: Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-Century Culture. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. X +312 pp. Index. ISBN: 978-1-107-04002-1.

Mcwilliams, Ellen. Women And Exile In Contemporary Irish Fiction, Maureen T. Reddy

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

No abstract provided.

“The Woman” And The Women Of Sherlock Holmes, Cassandra Poole

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

Women appear in nearly every Sherlock Holmes novel and short story. The vast majority are victims. Against the recurring oppression of women and women’s sexuality in the Holmes canon, a few exceptional female characters escape their Victorian gender roles. One rises above all others. She is “the woman,” Irene Adler, whose strength, intelligence, and independence have made her a recurring star in extra-canonical books, television shows, film adaptations, and Sherlockian fan fiction. This essay focuses on women and women’s sexuality within and beyond the Holmes canon to explore our enduring fascination with “the only woman to ever best Sherlock Holmes.”

'She Had Suffered So Many Humiliations For Want Of Money’: The Quest For Financial Independence In Sarah Grand’S The Beth Book, Melissa Purdue

English Department Publications

Melissa Purdue analyzes Sarah Grand’s semi-autobiographical The Beth Book (1897), “a New Woman novel deeply concerned with money—particularly women’s lack of it,” which finds its central metaphor in the book’s “discourse about hungry bodies, food, and consumption.” Grand celebrates her protagonist Beth’s proactive attitude toward money, indicating a larger shift in New Woman literature towards an endorsement of women earning their own money while also caring for others. As The Beth Book demonstrates, Purdue writes, “financial independence and what one does with money, rather than one’s distance from money, become important signals of feminine virtue in New Woman literature.”

“In Counterfeit Passion”: Cross-Dressing, Transgression, And Fraud In Shakespeare And Middleton, Anastasia S. Bierman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the way women cross-dressing as men functions as a crime in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl and William Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night. While many modern scholars have discussed cross-dressing in these plays, many look to the end of the plays as the foundation for their analysis rather than the play as a whole. Because of this oversight, scholars deem the characters in the plays not transgressive, when, in fact, cross-dressing is transgressive. They ignore the way cross-dressing is often presented in writing in the Renaissance, i.e. as a type …

The Female Quixote As Promoter Of Social Literacy, Amy Hodges

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

In Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, the unruly Arabella clashes with the eighteenth century’s conception of England as an orderly, unromantic site of commercial trade. Arabella’s romances prompt her to expect certain power structures from English society; she invites others to see her body as a spectacle and expects that her actions will solidify her status as a powerful woman. Yet Lennox reveals that English society sees Arabella’s body not as powerful, but as an object upon which they may construct their own potential site for the exchange of knowledge, an objectification that neither Arabella nor Lennox are prepared …

Madam Britannia: Women, Church, And Nation, 1712-1812, By Emma Major, Kathryn Stasio

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Cultivating Resources In Hard Times, Catherine Ingrassia

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Supporting Women Scholars: How To Get Things Done In Hard Times, Mona Narain

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

The Bitter Relicks Of My Flame: The Embodiment Of Venereal Disease And Prostitution In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Melanie Erin Osborn

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Resembling the mercurial, black beauty mark used as an ornamental concealment of syphilitic sores, Jane Austen’s comedy of manners likewise acted as a superficial cosmetic device that concealed the ubiquity of venereal disease and prostitution hidden within. Through her characters, Austen used veiled narrative to highlight the reality of venereal disease and prostitution in eighteenth-century England. This thesis uncovers the hidden narrative in Jane Austen’s novels, as a means of better understanding the impact venereal disease and prostitution had on sexual issues with women and the female body during the eighteenth century. Beginning with an almost comic reference to venereal …

Aemilia Lanyer's Use Of The Garden In Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, Anna Brovold

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Aemilia Lanyer used her collection of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum to redefine the way that women should look at themselves in the eyes of God. She began her collection with poems dedicated to women that she had deemed virtuous and worthy of individual attention. Her dedicatees were then presented to her readers as the true Disciples of Christ; an honor due to women because of their empathy for Christ's situation. Lanyer rewrote the biblical Passion story in order to include a feminized version of Christ, the rightful female Disciples of Christ and an additional trial presented to Pontius Pilate …

Piracy, Slavery, And Assimilation: Women In Early Modern Captivity Literature, David C. Moberly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines a hitherto neglected body of works featuring female characters enslaved in Islamicate lands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Englishmen and women were taken captive by pirates and enslaved in what is now the Middle East and North Africa. Several writers of the time created narratives and dramas about the experiences of such captives. Recent scholarship has brought to light many of these works and pointed out their importance in establishing what was still a young, unsure, and developing English identity in this early period. Most of this scholarship, however, has dealt with narratives of the …

Acting Virtuous: Chastity, Theatricality, And The Tragedie Of Mariam, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Given the interrelation of female chastity and female theatricality in early modem discourses, it comes as no surprise that both figure importantly in what is believed to be the first original English drama to be written by a woman. As Elizabeth Cary explores a Jewish queen 's sexual purity in The Tragedie of Mariam, she does so by concentrating on questions of performance. Cary's title character explicitly abjures theatricality even as she embraces chastity, creating a fissure in Renaissance discourses on women that threatens to swallow up the antifeminist idea that female chastity is always an act.

Women In Eighteenth Century London: Female Coming Of Age In Frances Burney’S Evelina, Cecilia, And The Witlings, Kate Hamilton

Honors Scholar Theses

The late eighteenth-century author Frances Burney is best known for popularizing the “comedy of manners,” a literary style later adopted by Jane Austen. Burney’s novels, journals, and plays offer an intriguing commentary on contemporary social customs and etiquette. In particular, she voices the concerns and desires of women, leading scholars to focus on the feminist overtones of her writing. Although she carefully examined female roles in the household and family structure, Burney also provided an insider’s perspective into London high life. As an acclaimed author and member of the royal court, Burney offers a rare insight into the lives of …

Bloudy Tygrisses: Murderous Women In Early Modern English Drama And Popular Literature, Alexandra Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines artistic and literary images of murderous women in popular print published in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The construction of murderous women in criminal narratives, published between 1558 and 1625 in pamphlet, ballad, and play form, is examined in the context of contemporary historical records and cultural discourse. Chapter One features a literature review of the topic in recent scholarship. Chapter Two, comprised of two subsections, discusses representations of early modern women in contemporary literature and criminal archives. The subsections in Chapter Two examine early modern treatises, sermons, and essays concerning the nature of women, the roles and …

Secrets And Hiding Places: The Worth Of Women In Nicholas Nickleby, Elizabeth Redmond

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In early Victorian England, married women were denied the legal right to own property, and social convention remanded them to ostracism if they chose to remain single. Likewise, jobs that were available to women failed to pay a living wage, so women were placed under tremendous economic and social pressure to marry. In Charles Dickens' novel, Nicholas Nickleby, he depicts how marriage becomes manipulated within the working and middle classes as a means to acquire wealth. Dickens also compares the repression of women to the abuse suffered by school children in the Yorkshire schools, which had a reputation for neglecting …

In Search Of A Female Self : The Masculinization Of May In Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, Kimberly Diane Whitley

Master's Theses

This examination of Chaucer's Merchant's Tale was undertaken as a response to existing scholarship. While criticism in the past tended toward a literal reading of the text, viewing it as a misogynist Merchant's story attesting to the innate depravity of women, more recent feminist criticism has leaned toward a reading which endeavors to defend the actions of May, claiming an evolvement on her part towards autonomy and self-knowledge. This thesis, taking its cue from French feminist theoretical assertions concerning self, refutes both of these readings. While it acknowledges the subversive nature of May's actions, it is unable to recognize any …